


Goggles, Mick

by SophiaCatherine



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Flarrowverse Shipyard, Grief/Mourning, Legends of Tomorrow Team are Family, M/M, Mental Health Issues, canon character deaths referenced but not shown, sad but hopeful ending, there's some fluff mixed in with all this angst I swear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-29
Updated: 2018-09-29
Packaged: 2019-07-18 23:38:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16129064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SophiaCatherine/pseuds/SophiaCatherine
Summary: Mick doesn't wear his goggles anymore.5 times Len reminded Mick about things he needed to do, and once when Mick had to remind Team Legends about something important.





	Goggles, Mick

**Author's Note:**

  * For [klep (kleptoandpyro)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kleptoandpyro/gifts).



> Happy birthday, klep! This was prompted by kleptoandpyro in the Flarrowverse Shipyard (Prompt Chest #7). Ideas developed together with them and Thette. 
> 
> Additional warning: Len is alive in the '5' but dead in the '+1'.

1. **Suit Up**

They’re standing by the rolled-up warehouse shutters. Waiting for Bivolo, who is eternally late. For a _heist_. Mick is pretty sure that jackass is just enough of a slacker to be the one who gets them caught, one of these days.

Mick folds his arms and watches the rest of the crew, scattered around the safe house.

Mardon is pissed about something. Mick can see the thundercloud forming above his head. And with the Weather Wizard, that’s not metaphorical. He’s messing with the bottom of the shutter— _rattle rattle—_ just enough to be as irritating as he probably aims to be.

Hartley is lazing on the sofa. He won’t stop talking. Next to him, Axel is nodding along like he’s following, but the kid might just have an earworm.

Shawna’s nervous, or something. She keeps flitting in and out of the room. That’s not annoying, Mick thinks, as she appears right next to him and he nearly shrieks out loud.

 _“Please,_ Bivolo,” Snart calls out to the bathroom, leaning against the doorframe with one leg folded over the other. “Feel free to take your time. I’m sure the Flash will have trouble catching up.” Everyone in the room other than Mick probably thinks he looks vaguely casual. After thirty years of partnership, though, Mick can see all his tells—the tapping foot, the compulsive watch-checking, the jittery fingers. The brewing mix of tension and excitement is dripping off him. It shouldn’t be as charming as Mick finds it.

Apparently looking for a distraction, Snart fixes Mick with a chilly glare. “Goggles, Mick,” he snarls.

Mick, who’s been holding the heat gun up against his head, slowly lowers it and stares at Snart. “Make me.” It’s an old argument, no one is ever surprised to find out. The goggles itch the sides of his head. He’ll be out in the field and _fidgeting, fidgeting_ with them to ease the pressure. And, hey, it’s not like he cares if his face gets a little scorched.

Snart tilts his head just enough to look dangerous—to anyone who hasn’t known him for thirty years. “Fine. You wanna blind yourself, go ahead. Just try to make it after we’ve finished, hmm? Need you to hit the targets. You can get yourself killed on your own time.”

Mick attempts to match his glare. He’s lost count of the number of staring contests he’s had with Len, by now. He’s pretty sure he’s never won a single one.

Sighing loudly, he puts the heat gun down on the table, and pulls his goggles down from his head and over his face. “Happy?”

“Delighted,” Snart says, with a smirk that might be a smile in disguise. And then Bivolo comes running in, and the boss’s attention shifts elsewhere. “Oh, he graces us with his presence. Aren’t we fortunate? All right, let’s move out. Got a jewelry shipment to hit, seems like we've all forgotten.”

Hartley raises his hand like he’s in school. “Now I need the bathroom.”

Mick guffaws at his partner’s expression.

“I miss the actual criminal underworld,” Len practically whines, surprisingly close to his ear. Then he pulls back and looks at him. “Do you even have the heat gun?”

“Yeah, you bozo, it’s right—Hang on, where’d I put it?”

Len suddenly looks like he’s seriously considering retirement.

* * *

2. **Belt Up**

“Seatbelt, Mick.”

Every time. Every single fucking time.

Len sighs and endures Mick’s glare, until his partner yields with a grunt that might be a “screw you.” He does as he’s told, though, pulling the restraint across his front and clicking it into place.

Other days, Len would be listening to Mick complaining about how it itches his neck or cuts into him, by now. As it is, he seems to be having a particularly sullen day. He just stares out of the window at the streets of the Central City slums, with their contrasting chunks of crumbling townhouses and glassy apartment buildings. Len squints unhappily at the infesting uptown money, pricing out ordinary locals and gangs alike, even shifting out the Families now. Tranquilized squalor under the sheen of new business and rain.

Len can see Mick boiling with the urge to speak, but he doesn’t encourage it. Eventually, though, Mick gives in. “You always gotta be in charge, don’t you?”

Len raps his fingers along the steering wheel. “Just keeping you safe.”

Back when they were in their heady twenties, Mick was even more irresponsible than he is now. Len, furious that his partner had gone missing just before a heist, came home to a phone call from the hospital. Mick had been thrown through a car window. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. He wouldn’t have made it, had there not been a nurse in the car behind him.

Len could never bring himself to ask what Mick’s blood alcohol level was at the time.

They both remember this, but “seatbelt” is as far as the discussion ever goes.

* * *

3. **Take Your Meds**

Mick _hates_ meds.

He hates everything about them. The headaches. The nausea. How he loses his edge, gets fuzzy and tired, like a big shambling elephant. And god, he doesn’t need to come across as any more stupid than he already does.

He doesn’t hate Elena, who gives him the meds. She’s okay. She’s never once said he _has_ to take them. She just knows when it’s getting bad—she looks at his shaking hands, observes his jagged-edged temper—and then she writes him out a prescription and says, “Just, you know. If you think it will help.”

Len, though. Just like with everything else, Len is an obsessive bastard about meds.

So Mick’s not surprised, during this latest bad stretch, when the asshole bangs on his door at 8 a.m. every morning and 5 p.m. every evening, like the fucking clockwork that his brain runs on, yelling, “Meds, Mick!”

Four days of this shit, and Mick’s red-eyed and cranky from another strung-out night, and he’s lying awake trying to decide what he hates more—the tossing in bed or the retching over the toilet. So, that morning, he’s got a head start on the guy with a hard-on for mornings. Mick hears him coming and kicks the door open, gets his own yelling in before the asshole starts up. _“Meds, Mick,”_ he jeers. “Jesus fucking—I get the message, okay? Crazy Rory needs his chemical straitjacket. God forbid he can make his own fucking decisions about what’s good for his own fucked-up brain!”

Len’s hand is still raised in a knocking fist, frozen in the air. He drops it. “Fine,” he says coolly, his eyes suggesting it is very much _not_ fine. He walks away.

Exhaustion wins, first, and Mick goes back to bed for a couple of hours. Then he goes to find his bastard of a partner.

He hovers in the doorway of the sparse kitchen, where Len is making a big show of examining the plans for an upcoming heist. Mick coughs.

Apparently those plans are damn interesting, though.

Mick blows out a sigh and joins his partner at the table. He scratches his head at a coaster. “You want a beer?”

Len glances up under a raised eyebrow, but there’s the promise of a smile there too. “Pretty sure you’re not supposed to be drinking on those meds.”

He folds his arms. “Don’t quit, do ya?”

The promise is fulfilled. A grinning Len gets up to find them both a beer. “You been holed up in that room too long,” he comments over his shoulder. _(Are you okay?)_

Mick glances up. “Surprised you noticed.” _(Been better.)_

Len reaches the drinks down from a shelf. “Need you able to function in time for the diamond heist.” _(It’ll be okay.)_

He breaks his first half-smile of the terrible week. “I’ll be there.” _(I know.)_

A beer appears in front of him, followed by a smirk. “Good.”

* * *

4. **Drink Some Water**

Len stumbles back into the safe house from a grocery run—a more adrenaline-laced activity than he needs it to be _every week_ —to find that Mick has got a pretty decent head-start on the beer without him. And without any food in his stomach.

He’s not sure if it’s just the usual random drinking, or if something’s brewing behind Mick’s death glares and, much later, distant gazes. Len doesn’t ask.

It’s like sitting vigil, times like this, when Mick’s determined to obliterate his night. Len doesn’t actually want to see him die of alcohol poisoning, as often as he threatens to let him. And besides, one of them’s got to be the designated adult and make sure the house doesn’t get burned to the ground, and that probably isn’t going to be the drunk pyromaniac. So Len coddles a single beer, letting Mick down one after the other and move on to whiskey like it’s barely making a dent in his consciousness.

At last it takes effect, though, Mick stumbling back from the bathroom and almost missing the sofa.

“Okay, buddy,” Len sighs, practically picking him up and getting him safely to the couch. “You need to go to bed.”

“M’fine,” he mutters back sourly. He shakes an almost-empty bottle over his head. “Ain’t even finished.”

He looks like he’s about to drop the bottle, and Len removes it from him carefully. “Yes, you are. Want me to get you some water?”

“Don’t need water.”

There’s no point even trying to glare at him, given that he probably can’t see at this point, so Len settles for a sigh. “You’re not going to bed without water after that drinking session, Mick. It’ll be me who has to listen to you complain about your hangover all day tomorrow.” He lowers Mick down. “I’ll be right back with it.”

By the time he returns, Mick is decidedly out, snoring with his mouth open. Only half of him is on the couch. Len sighs again, and lifts Mick’s leg onto the sofa. Then he quietly places the glass of water next to him. Just for when he inevitably wakes up in the night and can’t find his own fucking way to the sink. Len’s not being woken up for that.

He goes to bed.

He’s back in two minutes with the spare blanket from the bedroom. Well, it’s not like he was using it. Very carefully, he tucks it around Mick.

Who just keeps snoring.

“Night, buddy,” he murmurs, then heads back in the direction of the bedroom.

* * *

5. **Never Leave A Man Behind**

Warehouse at the docks. The cops have the place surrounded.

Len has pulled out most of his crew—they’re all behind an adjacent ramshackle building. And he’s cursing himself. He’d heard the rumour, last night in Saints and Sinners, that an operation was going to be rumbled. Could never be _his_ , said the arrogant voice in his head. His heists are too perfectly planned for that.

“We gotta move out,” Mick snaps at him.

Gripping the wall in front of him, Len doesn’t lift his gaze from the warehouse. “No.”

Mick grabs him by the shoulder. “Everyone’s out except Perez. Staying is suicide.”

Len removes Mick’s hand, turning his head to give him a look that would be more meaningful if they had more time. “I don’t leave one of my own behind, Mick. Get the others out of here.”

“You’re not going back in there alone!” Mick hisses.

“Perez is my responsibility.” He nods at the crew. _“Now,_ Mick.”

Mick’s face is all kinds of grim, but he does what he’s told. He always does, in the end.

Then Len hoists up the cold gun, draws on all that frosty arrogance he was just cursing, and gives the cops a performance as he walks back to to the warehouse.

* * *

+1. **Remember**

“Mick, what the hell is wrong with you today?” Sara snaps at him, and that confirms it.

Just another year when they don’t remember.

He’s buzzing with resentment for most of the makeshift ceremony, the crew crowded around the table in the galley. It’s all shit like candles that Leonard would have laughed at. And stories that Mick suspects are mostly just for _his_ benefit. And too many people looking in his direction for any of this to be anything like solace.

He holds himself up on the table in front of him, palms down on cold metal, and just wants to be alone.

It’s the second year in a row that he’s had to remind them of the date, and he wonders if they even remember they were there.

It’s not until Stein is saying the Mourner’s Kaddish, chanting achingly familiar unintelligible words, that it hits him. Half of them _weren’t._

And they came anyway, this bumbling crew who mostly didn’t even know Leonard, who didn’t know what he meant to Mick. (As if any of them could know that.) One sentence of explanation, and they dropped everything and came. Not for Len. For Mick.

He grips the table harder.

The assembly disperses in the direction of the bridge. There’s an anachronism that can’t wait. Why would it?

Mick stumbles towards his jumpseat; Ray catches him, and laughs. “Had a few too many there, haven’t you, Mick?”

“D’you blame me?” Mick mumbles. He looks up and, catching the look in Ray’s eyes, turns away towards his seat.

Behind him, Jax leans up against Mick’s seat and says something encouraging that Mick doesn’t quite register.

“You look like you could use a good meal,” Amaya says, taking the seat on his left. “I’ll make us that stew you like, after the mission.”

“Needs more potatoes,” he grunts, a strong endorsement from him, and she grins.

Zari’s hand drifts across his back as she takes the seat on his other side. “And then maybe video games.”

“Movies,” Nate counters, somewhere off to his right.

Front and center, Sara says, “Jump seat harness, Mick.”

“Got it, boss,” and he pulls it down.

The ship swings off into the green of the time stream, and Mick settles back into the long-familiar grumble of the engines. He lets a just-as-familiar crew argue around him about how to direct his evening.

He gets the heat gun into position for their dash off the ship into the field. Like always, he has the fleeting thought that he never wears his goggles anymore.

And then they’re spinning towards a landing, and he’s forgotten again.

(“Stop fidgeting with the harness, Mick.”

“It’s cold!”)

**Author's Note:**

> The timings don’t match up with the crew lineup, so let’s just say this is an AU where Jax and Stein stayed on board. The best timeline.
> 
> The saying of the Mourner’s Kaddish (a Jewish prayer for the dead) for Len was inspired by the wonderful story [Channukah, Ivy Town, 2033](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13230177) by [areyouarealmonster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/areyouarealmonster/pseuds/areyouarealmonster) and you should read it ‘cause it’s great.
> 
> Beta-read by the ever-patient [Thette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thette/pseuds/Thette).
> 
> I love comments. And now you can come find me on both [tumblr](https://sophiainspace.tumblr.com/) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/SophiaCatherin5).


End file.
